


the kind of love (i've been dreaming of)

by darlingargents



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Serial Killers, Blood and Violence, Comes Back Wrong, Dark Magic, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-10-21 08:10:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20690285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingargents/pseuds/darlingargents
Summary: Here’s how it started: Gansey died.





	the kind of love (i've been dreaming of)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lypiphaera](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lypiphaera/gifts).

> Title from Dinner and Diatribes by Hozier.

There’s something bleeding at Gansey’s feet.

He’s not wearing his contacts; he blinks, his vision wavers, and a vaguely human form swims into focus and then out. He’s dizzy, breathing hard, and he can’t remember how he got here: barefoot, bare-armed and freezing. There’s snow on the ground, slowly melting and turning red.

He sways a little. His head is flooded with endorphins; he can’t remember ever feeling like this, like he’s so full of joy that he could float away. More and more sensations are coming back: something sticky dried on his arms, his hands, his face. His feet numb and stinging. Something in his hand: it’s solid and warm from his body heat, and when he lifts it — slow, so slowly, like he’s in a dream — he sees that it’s a knife: heavy, with a metal handle, covered in blood.

He feels a smile begin to grow on his face.

*

Here’s how it started: Gansey died.

Blue didn’t accept it. It turns out, even preparing for months at the possibility isn’t enough. Not when you know there’s another way.

She’d waited until the moon vanished from the sky, and with Ronan’s help, carried Gansey’s body — stiff with rigor mortis, starting to fall apart — into the woods, by a poisoned stream. She used every trick in the book, every ingredient she wasn’t supposed to know about; she cut open the palm of her hand and let it bleed into Gansey’s mouth.

The fact that she didn’t have her own magic was nothing. She knew how to  _ find _ it — the oldest, the most dangerous kind.

Ultimately, she made a gamble.

The gamble failed.

*

For the first few days, it seemed like everything was fine. He’d cried, he’d kissed her, they’d gone back to Monmouth and they were together again. Arrangements were made, discreetly; Richard Gansey was a living human again.

It seemed right, but something felt wrong.

As Blue rode her bike through Henrietta in those first few days, she could’ve sworn the trees were watching, whispering. The feeling only kept growing.

At night, she dreamed of endless forests and storm-black skies; deer running through the woods, away from her. A boy who looked like Gansey but had too many teeth when he smiled, and eyes black as pitch. When she got close, those eyes began to bleed, and when she kissed him, the forest swallowed them both whole.

Her mother couldn’t look at her. Neither of them spoke of it.

*

She finds him in the woods one night, over the body of a man, close to dead and long since silenced. His throat had been cut down to the bone. She doesn’t know what brought her here, what woke her in the night and compelled her onto her bike and into the hills to find Gansey’s car by the woods, walking the last half-mile or so before finding him. When she stares down at the man — fingers opening and closing in the dirt, eyes on her as she approaches — she feels nothing, and the emptiness would be frightening if she let herself think about it

Gansey is shaking, with cold or exhilaration or both, covered in blood and barefoot and blank-eyed. She thinks he’s been standing here for a long time. That he hurt the man and then woke up.

“Gansey,” she says, quiet, and slowly, he turns his head, makes eye contact with her. She almost reels back in horror at what she sees: nothing. Eyes without a soul; something that shouldn’t exist. But as she holds eye contact, something inside him begins to come back, slowly.

“Blue,” he says, and it’s like a seal is broken; he falls to his knees, staring at the man. He drops the knife and feels for a pulse. Even so, his actions seem rote, mechanical; he’s doing what he thinks he should be.

He doesn’t need to. She can see that.

“Give me the knife,” she says, and he looks up at her, looking wild and a little frantic and — hungry. She can’t tell what for.

He hands her the knife, silent, and watches as she slides the knife between the fourth and fifth ribs and finally ends the man’s life. She wants to ask who he is, where he came from, and why he’s here, but it doesn’t matter.

“Let’s go home,” she says.

*

A storm begins as Gansey drives home, Blue’s bike in the back and her hand on his thigh. On the steering wheel, his hands are still bloody. Just like the rest of him. When he gets back to Monmouth Blue quietly helps him strip off his layers and he sits in the bottom of his shower, alone, watching the blood run down the drain.

When he finally turns off the water and dries off, he can hear thundercracks in the distance, see flashes of light through the massive windows. Rain is sheeting down and thudding on the roof, so loud it could drown out Gansey’s thoughts. When he comes back into the main room, Blue is sitting on his bed, her face illuminated every few seconds by lightning, flipping through one of his books with disinterest. She closes it when she sees Gansey coming, and moves over so they can both sit on the bed.

“Why?” she asks after a few moments of silence. Not awkward, exactly, or tense, but… charged. Gansey knows what he says next is important, though that doesn’t mean he knows  _ what _ he should be saying.

“I don’t know,” he says, and takes her hand. There’s still blood on it, just traces — the edges of her fingernails, a smudge on her wrist that she missed. “I just… woke up there.”

“Why didn’t you finish the job?” she asks, and Gansey keeps looking at her hand. He’s not sure he wants to know what’s in her eyes right now. He rubs his thumb over the blood on her wrist, and it flakes away.

“I was waiting,” he says, and it’s not what he meant to say — he didn’t even mean to speak at all, he thinks, but for some reason he did — but it feels true. “Waiting for you.”

She takes him by the chin and raises his head, forcing eye contact. What he sees there is — beautiful, and terrifying, and somehow he’s never felt safer.

There’s also something there that he can’t detect, that maybe she can’t either; a reluctance, a fear, or some sort of guilt; it’s there, but it’s vanishing quickly. Whatever part of her is resisting this — whatever part of Gansey is resisting this — is nearly buried and gone. He finds that he doesn’t mind.

He leans in first for the kiss. She doesn’t move away.

*

The next life they take, it’s by Gansey’s hand. It’s both of them, really — neither would be doing this alone, Blue knows — but it’s still important that it’s him taking the final step, that she presses the knife into his hand with a kiss to his cheek and a whispered blessing, and he smiles and slits the throat of the man at their feet. He chokes to death on his blood over the next four and a half minutes. When he’s stopped moving, Blue takes the knife, wipes the blade on her leggings, and walks away.

Gansey follows.

*

_ SERIAL KILLER STALKS HENRIETTA _

The headline seems to jump out of the paper, in front of Blue at the kitchen table. Maura stands over her, radiating a fury like Blue’s never felt.

“What did you do,” she says, and it’s barely a question. Blue knows the answer has nothing to do with the seventh butchered corpse found in the woods, and the strange lack of fingerprints or DNA or connections making the case into a dead end. It’s what she tapped into that night when she refused to let Gansey stay dead.

It’s the first thing Maura has said to her since.

“I did what I had to,” she says, and doesn’t say that the change is irrelevant. Maura knows.

Maura’s mouth presses into a thin, white line, and she picks up the paper, folding it along the centre and tucking it under her arm. “I know they won’t find anything to tie you to this. Otherwise I’d be turning you in.”

“So what are you going to do?”

Maura meets her eyes, and doesn’t look away. “You upset the balance of the living and the dead. You knew better and you did it anyway. You know that this can be undone, and it will be; it’s only a matter of letting it happen or kicking and fighting every step of the way. He’s one of the dead, and he doesn’t belong here. You can kill as many people as you like. Other souls dying will not keep him here. I don’t need to do anything, it’ll happen soon enough.”

Blue is struck, for a moment, with a fear so complete that it’s hard to stay upright. “If you kill him again—”   
“He is  _ already dead _ .” For a moment, Maura almost looks sympathetic in her anger. “You’re delusional. I can see it. Everyone can. Why do you think no one else will go near him? He is a reanimated corpse with a disintegrating mind, and his time is running out. Even you’ll start to see that soon.”

“He is alive, and if you do anything to change that, I will kill you.” Blue can feel something in her break as she speaks the words. Maura looks like she’s been hit. Blue stands, and steps past her mother to leave.

*

He’s not dead, she thinks, as their eighth kill goes just as smoothly as the others. I would know, she thinks, as he presses her down into his bed and kisses her until neither of them can breathe. I saved him, she thinks as she falls asleep in his bed, warm and feeling safer than she ever has.

She dreams of Gansey’s hands, black with dirt, pushing out of his grave. Of him kissing her, and opening her eyes to see maggots where his eyes used to be, crawling down his face. Of falling, and falling, and falling, and him catching her. When she turns to thank him, there’s a skull where his head should be.

*

Gansey can’t sleep.

Every time he closes his eyes, he tastes blood and grave dirt — the moment he came back to life. He can hear monsters, at the corners of his mind, watching and waiting for him to fall asleep so they can take him back where he came from.

The only time he feels safe — feels alive — is when there’s someone bleeding out in his hands, and when Blue is by his side.

He keeps forgetting who he is. Where he came from. Everything but Blue.

*

He hasn’t eaten in weeks.

Blue stares into the fridge, her fingers going numb, unable to move. It has the same food that she stocked it with when he came back to life. The exact same.

Rotting, and falling apart. Untouched and ruined.

She barely makes it to the sink before she throws up.

“Blue?” she hears from the other room, and she slams the fridge shut a few seconds before Gansey walks in. “Blue — oh. Are you sick?”

“Guess so,” she says. “Do you want to get dinner, or something?”

“I’m fine,” he says, and oh, how did she not see, how did she not  _ notice _ ? He’s not eating. Is he sleeping? Is he doing anything that a living, breathing person would do?

“What’s wrong?” he says. She’s been staring at him silently for at least a minute.

“You — are you eating?” The words feel like knives scraping her throat raw. She doesn’t want to hear the answer. She needs to hear the answer.

“No,” he says, and frowns. “I don’t — I don’t remember. Am I supposed to be?”   
“Sleeping?”

“I can’t. I keep seeing—”

“Can you even  _ breathe _ ?” She’s halfway to a panic attack. This isn’t real, she thinks. This is a nightmare, this isn’t real, she’s going to wake up and he’ll be asleep beside her, really asleep, and they’ll never have killed another person, and he’ll never have even died in the first place.

“Blue, I don’t know what’s happening — did I do something wrong? You’re scaring me.”

Her eyes start to hurt with unshed tears. She doesn’t know what to say, what to do to fix this. She ruined it, she ruined everything, and she can’t take it back.

She has to fix it.

*

Maura doesn’t say a word when Blue walks in, just stands and wraps her in a hug. In her mother’s arms, Blue begins to cry, and doesn’t stop for what feels like hours.

When her eyes are hurting, but dry, she pulls away. And asks for help.

*

“Why are we here?”

She doesn’t answer. They’re nearly there: the poisoned stream, the full moon, the forest that’s been dead since she destroyed the balance.

“Blue?” He touches her arm, and his fingers are cold.

She blinks back tears, and turns to him. Kisses him one last time, and pretends that it will last forever until the moment she pulls away.

It’s five minutes to midnight. She begins.


End file.
